Bread

Bread is transformative. That’s the word that keeps recurring in the literature, “transformative”. It’s true. There is, on the face of it, no way it could not be. Bread does not occur in nature. It is artificial. It is an artifact. It is ancient, and therefore in a sense an ancient artifact, one from which we still have a huge amount to learn about the past. About our past as humans.

Happy Hacker’s Notebook: Mysteries of the HP 14-an013nr: RAM

In the video “AICvideo” expresses the opinion that more than 8GB of memory is unnecessary in this machine because of the limited processor power. I’m don’t really have an opinion about that yet, but it’s worth noting that because of the integrated graphics the system memory is also the graphics memory, and it does have a full-HD screen, which is a lot more pixels to drive from memory than most notebooks this size.

The Real Problem with Consumer Computers

Okay, the price wasn’t down there with Raspberry Pi stuff, but get this: for less than $200 you could buy a notebook computer with a quad-core processor, a 14-inch full HD screen (1920×1060), HDMI out, USB 3.0 (one, plus two 2.0), and 4GM of RAM upgradable to 16GB. Nominally the catch was the storage, this was in the “Chromebook” category (even though it was running Windows 10, not Chrome OS) so.. they crippled the storage capacity. Big time. There was only a sad, slow little 32GB M.2 eMMC board running through an adapter to make it look like a real SSD… but if you opened the case, there was a vacant space for a hard drive or SSD, only lacking a cable and caddy, and another empty space sized for an optical drive (but with no case opening) that could easily hold a SSD and an optical-to-SATA adapter taken from an $8 caddy, giving you any amount of fast storage you cared to pay for. It was made by Hewlett-Packard (HP), and it had the lovely and memorable name of 14-on013nr. It was a bargain, and with a little work and a little money you could hot-rod this sleeper into a very usable general-purpose notebook for a fraction of the typical prices of anything comparable.

The PirateBox Pi Papoose

The basic idea is that you’ll be able to walk into a coffeehouse or take a table on the sidewalk somewhere, pull out a notebook computer with some electronic bits stuck somehow to the back of the lid (very cyberpunk aesthetic, sort of like a DeLorean with high-tech stuff stuck on the outside), have PirateBox up and running in the background to entice other folks around to log in and share whatever while you work on the notebook and on the Internet in the foreground, but you’re still able to connect to the PirateBox, monitor and control things there from the notebook.

Emergency one-person survival stove- the best choice is alcohol, 91% of the time.

So, we have trail equipment stores, hardware stores of various types, liquor stores, drug stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, boating equipment stores and marinas as possible sources if you’re afoot on your own. That’s pretty versatile. I don’t think any other liquid fuel comes close, unless you’re willing to use automotive gasoline, which requires special stoves and a lot of ventilation and there’s still danger.

Firebirds turn out to be real. Maybe.

Honestly, I would have guessed that this is about as likely as starfish making musical fiddles out of shells to serenade each other under the water.
The gist of the article is that they claim to have confirmed something fairly common in Aboriginal lore, that some “birds of prey” in Australia take burning twigs from an active fire to another site, attempting and sometimes succeeding in spreading the fire to a new location in order to flush out rodents and other prey.